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In-Ear Device That Translates Foreign Languages in Real Time

195 points by maxoliver 10y ago

corin_ 10y ago
It's hard to imagine that it will work smoothly enough to be useful, at least right away, and more of an interesting gimmicky gadget. I'm looking forward to trying it regardless, assuming they succeed in releasing it (due September). edit: Slightly misleading on their website. Says "Signup on the waitlist and be entered to win a FREE pair!" When you sign-up it then says they are giving away one per month and you can get one entry into the prize draw by doing certain things such as tweeting about them or liking them on FB, but that I have 0 entries for signing up to the waitlist. Meh, I would have signed up for updates anyway, and don't particularly care about a contest I'd likely not win, it's just the principle of misleading wording.
- sleepychu 10y ago
  +1 the kind of company I just don't want to deal with.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Reminds me of x.ai. You sign up, they put you on a huge "waitlist" that moves slowly, and periodically remind you that you can jump big chunks of that list by spamming people about the product on social media. Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.
    - hackcasual 10y ago
      It's not really new. Years ago before Facebook clamped down, it was pretty common practice to entice people to spam their friends list
    - CPLX 10y ago
      > Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. New?
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        Among popular startups? The waiting list approach? New, at least for me.
madaxe_again 10y ago
Now, if there were a product that would have appropriately been called babelfish, this would have been it. But no, "pilot". I guess yahoo copyrighted babelfish?
- corin_ 10y ago
  Could they trademark (it wouldn't be copyright) a term that they themselves copied from a work of fiction they don't own the copyright to, given that the context (i.e. what it does) isn't different to that in the work of fiction?
  - madaxe_again 10y ago
    Yes - and yes, trademark, not copyright, pre-coffee conflation. Consider the Nexus line of phones, lifted directly from PKD's Do Androids Dream. Copyright is about area of applicability - I bet babelfish is trademarked for "translation services and products".
    - kuschku 10y ago
      This is like as if I’d trademark "Quidditch" for a sports league where a sport is played with brooms, flying around, etc. That shouldn’t be possible, and hopefully any court would laugh at whoever claims to have a trademark on Babelfish.
      - madaxe_again 10y ago
        Oddly, while I can find three trademarks, Yahoo isn't one of the holders. https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-fish-85107190.html https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-fish-85107190.htm...
alphydan 10y ago
I can't wait for the mis-translation anecdotes to start pouring in ... maybe I should make a site to collect them :) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translate-error-as-pontes-spain-clitoris-food-festival-grelo-galicia http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translat...
rcarmo 10y ago
It's not wet and squirmy like a babel fish, but I fear the consequences of it being able to fully translate product/sales-speak into engineer-speak and vice-versa. Like Douglas Adams wrote: "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  an ambivalent perspective from Vernor Vinge, aFUtD "Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters."
curiousigor 10y ago
Just wondering if this is anything more than a in-ear bluetooth headset connected to an app that uses google translate as its backend? Because if yes, they would maybe have more success selling the app that you can use with the headphones you already own already and so making the user acquisition a bit smoother than buying a bluetooth headset...I guess more people would give less money for an app that gets updated than an headset that could potentially break... Unless there is some technology in the headset itself so it can work on its own without the app connected to it. Didn't see anything like that mentioned here though.
- LoSboccacc 10y ago
  hope not the requirement for being online all the time is quite taxing especially if you use this abroad
piyush_soni 10y ago
I think making the device is the easy part, the hard part is doing the translation right in most of the cases, which both Google and Bing have been unable to do so far. 'Google Translate' app already has a communication mode where two people with different languages can talk, but if it worked good there was nothing preventing them to make such an earpiece.
- hyperpallium 10y ago
  They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20[], which is pretty often. But in a face to face conversation, with so much non-verbal communication going on, it may be more than enough. Very different from cold, isolated translation or online. It's certainly far ahead of having no language, or trying to look up a phrase book. BTW It's like "word lens" for audio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens Google bought and made it free. I've tried it, and it works, it's very cool. But I don't know if it's actually that useful, or even gets used much, in the field. [] EDIT sorry, those figures were just for speech recognition!
  - piyush_soni 10y ago
    > They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20 Which set of languages is this stat about? For example, trying English with Hindi (they don't support it right now), though Google Translate is impressive, there are still a lot of mistakes (much more than 1 in 20). For English to Spanish, I assume the error rate would be lesser in comparison.
    - samastur 10y ago
      It isn't that better. Admittedly I am only learning Spanish, but I get odd or incorrect translations far more often than 1 in 20 and because I am a beginner, I don't throw really difficult cases at it. This is also text only use so ignoring things like accents (was that a p, v or b?) which can make the whole thing even more difficult. For other languages, like my native Slovenian, it is even more ridiculous.
- 10y ago
bluesign 10y ago
Or you can always use babel fish but it is a bit ticklish
netsharc 10y ago
"Do you want... do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"
- Piskvorrr 10y ago
  My hovercraft is full of eels.
kriro 10y ago
How good are cell phone microphones? Could I hack up a similar device with my regular headset plugged into my phone and the phone picking up the speech and translating it and reading it back to me (Google Translate)? So basically phone/app doing all the work and using whatever headphone is available. I suppose the hard parts are identifying what originates from a person and the actual speech to text and back? So far it seems like it could be build from existing blocks. Doesn't have to be great and can gradually improve...a worthy hack around project imo I haven't checked in on CMU's Sphinx in a while but that was a speech-speech system I looked at for a bit. What are the state of the art building blocks for such a project? Would I want speech-text-speech (I assume this is easier?) or directly speech-speech? Edit: This list seems useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software#Open_source_acoustic_models_and_speech_corpus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...
- r-w 10y ago
  Doesn't seem far from what Google Translate already does; it's just a matter of automatically dictating the translation.
pka 10y ago
I remember reading an "interactive" book as a kid (a book with numbered short episodes, and at the end of each one you are presented with a couple of choices how the story would continue, it was awesome) where the good guy was sent back in time by the bad guy to the wild west where he had to convince the indians to trust him and fight with him against the same bad guy, who liked to slaughter them for fun, or die with them. In order to understand the natives, he had some gadget implanted in his brain that translated their language directly into his own. I remember thinking "yeah right, never gonna happen." :) This is probably far away from being able to translate languages perfectly, but still. The future came pretty fast.
scotty79 10y ago
I'd like to see more audio augmented reality systems. Translation, taking baby cry down a notch, amplifying speech directed at you, autofiguring out best moment to tell you things you might need to know.
- phireal 10y ago
  > taking baby cry down a notch This could end badly. I think the whole purpose of babies crying is to ensure you do something about it. Not that there's always a solution, but I'd rather be awoken by a loud, irritating cry frequently than not hear them when they might need me.
  - DoubleMalt 10y ago
    Yes, but in public where I am exposed to other people's offspring that would be great. Especially when there is no escape like in planes.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - gokhan 10y ago
    You may want it if it's not your baby. Sitting next to one in a plane, for example.
  - scotty79 10y ago
    With baby everyting can go badly. I wasn't thinking about shutting out baby cry to get some sleep (sleeping with headphones?) but rather making it little less intrusive when it screems in your face and you are sufficiently aware that it does already. Also I was thinking about capping the volume of baby cry to some level (80dB?) not reducing it propotionately. Besides, I'm not sure how the number of babies harmed because of not crying loud enough compares to the number of babies that were hurt because they cried too loud. Loudness of baby cries is probably delicately finetuned for other times when incentive to feed you baby had to overcome the desire to feed youself bit more. I think modern humans have enough other incentives to keep their babies alive and healthy. Disclaimer: I have no children. I am not significantly bothered by other people babies crying.
nxzero 10y ago
Always imagine everyone using tech like this, slowly using their own slang, then something goes wrong, devices die, and no one understands the slang languages each person now uses. __ Person : Babel. Person2: Babel? Person : Babel!!
- saalweachter 10y ago
  To a certain extent, this is equivalent to "imagine everyone's glasses fell off and broke". Sure, these devices are more complex and only a handful of people know how they work, but by the time they spread through an entire civilization and we adapted to be unable to communicate without them... they'd be as robust as modern day glasses and you'd have repair services in every mall.
  - nxzero 10y ago
    Maybe, maybe not, but agree that your version of the future is just, if not more, as possible. That said, more complex things get, the more likely that something will be missed, an error made, and/or unaccounted for due to its not having been seen before. On the bright side, intentional disruption rarely have this sort of impact.
impy 10y ago
I'm skeptical we'll be seeing this device. I guess it'll mainly depend if they'd get funded and even then I only see this as a short lived gimmick. The machine translation software just isn't good enough. It's unmissable to me, but for real time translation, it's simply not there yet. Since they have to license the speech recognition and machine translation technologies, in the end they'll just be competing with bluetooth headsets that are suited for picking up voices in conversations and they'll simple draw the shortest straw.
- visarga 10y ago
  Agree. What does the earplug device offer that regular bluetooth headsets don't. The actual translation is happening in the phone or cloud anyway.
  - impy 10y ago
    Well, the regular bluetooth headsets wont do the job just yet, you want the microphone to be directional forward facing to keep it simple, preferably adaptable but that's more complex. The regular bluetooth headsets are aimed at picking up your own voice. So you'd want something more hearing aid like.
kinai 10y ago
For business yes, for private? No thank you, you'll lose a lot of knowledge, understanding, mental skills by not trying to learn/understand a new language.
dcw303 10y ago
I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of garbage really. I desperately need something to translate Japanese into my ear, and I'm probably just good enough to relay my point back without the other party needing an eng->jp version, so I would be a prime customer for this gadget. But the technological accuracy is just not yet there in either speech recognition or translation.
- Grue3 10y ago
  The japanese version will be pretty terrible, I'd imagine. Too much homophones and ambiguous wording. "sounandayo!" = そうなんだよ "that's right!" = 遭難だよ "it's an accident!"
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    The pitch on those are quite different and there is obviously context to rely on too. I mean whether the software can do all that is a question, but something like Siri does OK with Japanese speech recognition (at least not a lot worse than other languages from what I can tell).
- GordonS 10y ago
  I'm from Scotland, and on the rare occassions time I need to phone a US voice activated phone line (e.g. Expedia.com's), I have to put on a ridiculous American accent for the system to understand me. This is a hard problem.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8
  - thedaemon 10y ago
    As a Southern American, I have to put on a Northern or Western American accent. Don't feel so bad.
smilbandit 10y ago
"The creator says he came up with the idea when he met a French girl." and just like that he came up with the whole concept of real time language translation, something the world has never even considered before /snark
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  Annoyingly worded, but probably means "attained the drive for pursuing the idea" instead. If it was a more common realisation that it is not the idea but the drive that is rare then we would have a lot fewer hot air inventors.
  - johanneskanybal 10y ago
    Well that's what makes it funny it's not even that it's just general advancements in this area makes this a very natural thing to pursue.
- e12e 10y ago
  Well, it might be that the beautiful British girl at that Islington flat-party was busy talking to an alien herself.
- dean 10y ago
  Yeah, this is what I came here to say as well. And while we're at it, I got this great idea that we should cure cancer. The idea came to me when I saw someone sick with cancer. Next stop: patent office.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- dang 10y ago
  Applying the Principle of Charity—i.e. choosing to respond to the strongest interpretation of a statement—would have been helpful here. There are multiple interpretations of a phrase like that. Choosing an obviously idiotic one leads to snarky internet comments, something we need less of on HN. Choosing the strongest one might lead you to post nothing or it might trigger a thoughtful response. Either way we get better signal/noise ratio, which is what we're hoping for here. http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html
Kurtz79 10y ago
Sorry to sound so negative, but it seems something halfway between an April Fool and some Kickstarter "scam" (possibly in good conscience, but still). Both voice recognition and translation are HARD problems, for which even companies with tons of resources and talent like Apple and Google were able to provide only sketchy and partial solutions. No to mention issues like battery life, connectivity (hard to believe this device would be able to work without a permanent connection to cloud servers doing the heavy lifting, like Siri does) etc... The FAQ is simply "too good to be true". http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and-launch-date/ http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and...
- dclowd9901 10y ago
  Meanwhile, Bragi's wireless headphones have a microphone for pass-thru audio, and bluetooth connectivity. Coupled with a smartphone, I'm curious why an app for this doesn't already exist?
- mikeash 10y ago
  Jibbigo was doing decent voice-to-voice translation entirely locally back in the iPhone 3GS days. You still had all the usual pitfalls of voice recognition and machine translation, but it was good enough to be useful. Your FAQ link isn't loading for me (hugged to death?) but I watched the video on the page HN links to here and I see nothing in it that's infeasible. As with any voice recognition and machine translation product, you'll probably need to be patient and tolerant of many errors, and I wouldn't be surprised if they gloss over that, but it could still be useful. Edit: the FAQ finally loaded. I don't see anything particularly remarkable in there. There are no promises for battery life, speed, or accuracy. The basic premise of offline voice-to-voice translation is totally doable and has been done.
- ma2rten 10y ago
  Maybe they are using Google translate and Google speach api?
  - hangonhn 10y ago
    Those APIs aren't free and the lag between the translation and network connectivity means it would be very difficult to have a real time conversation.
planetjones 10y ago
I just don't see this working very well. The current language translation tools just are not good enough to support a proper conversation. Translating languages via technology is a hard problem and it's far from solved. Coupled with this fundamental problem is identifying speech accurately; something Siri fails to do regularly with my voice. If this thing gets built I am guessing it will be a novelty product.
Grue3 10y ago
This isn't necessarily possible for any two random languages. Not every language has a SubjectVerbObject order like English, and even if it does, each language has its own quirks with how the words are ordered. For example in spanish "un pez grande" = "a big fish", but if you translate in real time it comes out as "a fish big". Of course, an interpreter can reword it as "a fish, which is big, ..." but this is not always possible.
Zklsalue8 10y ago
Machine translation is so bad that I can't get excited.
lordxenu 10y ago
This seems like a scam, or at best a marketing lie. Voice recognition is still an experimental field that's very difficult to get right. Even today's professional voice recognition software requires some voice training. There's no way this thing can accurately pick up speech in a random environment. And given that most voice recognition software require some decent hardware (think your phone or your pc). I doubt it's gonna fit into that tiny earpiece with today's hardware specs.
Qworg 10y ago
This is just Skype Translator coupled with an earpiece... :) https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-translator/ https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-translator/
rasz_pl 10y ago
Its a scam We have brilliant entrepreneur coming up with revolutionary idea no one had before(lol), sleek renders and good looking models, price point already set, all that and ... absolutely ZERO tech behind it. lets set so double the killer delete select all
gwbas1c 10y ago
I must admit that I'm highly skeptical. Show me a working app for my phone that does voice translation, and then I'll believe that something like this works.
CodeSheikh 10y ago
Too good to be true. Seems like they are just trying to get some media traction to convince some VC for some funding or creating a footprint for themselves in the tech fraternity. Yes I will be a cynical hypocrite when it hits the market with seamless performance and after I will purchase it. Real life scenario: French chick: Bonjour. es tu perdu? Scrawny-geek: (All blushing and shit...Is she interested in me? put on "groundbreaking" Pilot earbuds) FC: excusez moi mister!! SG: gives hand gesture to wait 10 seconds time lapse analog audio signals are converted to digital and then data buffer is sent to the smartphone via BT. Phone pre-process the raw data and sends it to Watson-Siri-Echo-Now-esque ultra system composed of signal processor then NLP then translator and it sends it back to the phone and phone does some more voodoo on it and sends it back to the Pilot via BT and plays it to its user. SG: Oh. I am sorry mademoiselle. I am just trying to find direction to the bathroom. FC: lost and confused expressions appear as if she did not understand one word of English SG: punching the air in frustration..wish this device could play the translation back to me in French
johanneskanybal 10y ago
"came up with the idea"
dboreham 10y ago
What is wrong with you people? 7 hours old and only TWO mentions of Douglas Adams??
6stringmerc 10y ago
Considering the variety of French accents - Paris, regional France, Africa, Caribbean, Canadian, South East Asian, and guys like me in Texas and more - I'm rather skeptical this unit will work as seamlessly as the marketing video advertises. Just a thought. C'est mignonne, vraiment.
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anigbrowl 10y ago
This product indeed sounds too good to be true but we'll probably have something that delivers within 10 years. Add that to a virtual assistant and the future could be very different. Automatthew's Friend by Stanislaw Lem explores one possible scenario.
nikkwong 10y ago
Just the fact that they are listing their product on Indiegogo instead of Kickstarter signals to me that they probably got shut when trying to publish their project on Kickstarter—who is trying hard to distance theirselves from these moonshot projects that are likely to disappoint consumers. If you don't have a really serious working prototype now, Kickstarter is super-duper hesitant to let you on their platform.
chipotle2 10y ago
if you type finnish into google translate, the results in english are pretty bad. furthermore, google translate only manages the "written" finnish language... which nobody talks like. everyone uses "spoken" finnish which is not translated at all in google translate. i wonder how many other languages have this property.
ecolak 10y ago
Nothing new here. As the article mentions, it's the Babelfish from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've wanted to build one myself since I read the book, but the fundamental problem of machines translating languages is still a very hard problem. This thing won't work.
syngrog66 10y ago
About a year ago someone tried hiring me to do this. At least to do research and report back with recommendations. On one hand I think we've never been closer to being able to create this kind of product. On the other its still rife with complexity and edge cases. Reality is messy.

195 points by maxoliver 10y ago

It's hard to imagine that it will work smoothly enough to be useful, at least right away, and more of an interesting gimmicky gadget. I'm looking forward to trying it regardless, assuming they succeed in releasing it (due September). edit: Slightly misleading on their website. Says "Signup on the waitlist and be entered to win a FREE pair!" When you sign-up it then says they are giving away one per month and you can get one entry into the prize draw by doing certain things such as tweeting about them or liking them on FB, but that I have 0 entries for signing up to the waitlist. Meh, I would have signed up for updates anyway, and don't particularly care about a contest I'd likely not win, it's just the principle of misleading wording.

sleepychu 10y ago
+1 the kind of company I just don't want to deal with.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Reminds me of x.ai. You sign up, they put you on a huge "waitlist" that moves slowly, and periodically remind you that you can jump big chunks of that list by spamming people about the product on social media. Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. I hate stuff like this.
  - hackcasual 10y ago
    It's not really new. Years ago before Facebook clamped down, it was pretty common practice to entice people to spam their friends list
  - CPLX 10y ago
    > Asking people to whore themselves on social media is becoming a new startup marketing strategy. New?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Among popular startups? The waiting list approach? New, at least for me.

madaxe_again 10y ago

Now, if there were a product that would have appropriately been called babelfish, this would have been it. But no, "pilot". I guess yahoo copyrighted babelfish?

corin_ 10y ago
Could they trademark (it wouldn't be copyright) a term that they themselves copied from a work of fiction they don't own the copyright to, given that the context (i.e. what it does) isn't different to that in the work of fiction?
- madaxe_again 10y ago
  Yes - and yes, trademark, not copyright, pre-coffee conflation. Consider the Nexus line of phones, lifted directly from PKD's Do Androids Dream. Copyright is about area of applicability - I bet babelfish is trademarked for "translation services and products".
  - kuschku 10y ago
    This is like as if I’d trademark "Quidditch" for a sports league where a sport is played with brooms, flying around, etc. That shouldn’t be possible, and hopefully any court would laugh at whoever claims to have a trademark on Babelfish.
    - madaxe_again 10y ago
      Oddly, while I can find three trademarks, Yahoo isn't one of the holders. https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html https://trademarks.justia.com/785/15/babelfish-78515910.html https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html https://trademarks.justia.com/772/49/babelfish-77249656.html https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-fish-85107190.html https://trademarks.justia.com/851/07/babel-fish-85107190.htm...

alphydan 10y ago

I can't wait for the mis-translation anecdotes to start pouring in ... maybe I should make a site to collect them :) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translate-error-as-pontes-spain-clitoris-food-festival-grelo-galicia http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/03/google-translat...

rcarmo 10y ago

It's not wet and squirmy like a babel fish, but I fear the consequences of it being able to fully translate product/sales-speak into engineer-speak and vice-versa. Like Douglas Adams wrote: "Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

hyperpallium 10y ago
an ambivalent perspective from Vernor Vinge, aFUtD "Ravna had a theory (not that widely accepted, actually) that where beings have a common fluency, little else matters."

curiousigor 10y ago

Just wondering if this is anything more than a in-ear bluetooth headset connected to an app that uses google translate as its backend? Because if yes, they would maybe have more success selling the app that you can use with the headphones you already own already and so making the user acquisition a bit smoother than buying a bluetooth headset...I guess more people would give less money for an app that gets updated than an headset that could potentially break... Unless there is some technology in the headset itself so it can work on its own without the app connected to it. Didn't see anything like that mentioned here though.

LoSboccacc 10y ago
hope not the requirement for being online all the time is quite taxing especially if you use this abroad

piyush_soni 10y ago

I think making the device is the easy part, the hard part is doing the translation right in most of the cases, which both Google and Bing have been unable to do so far. 'Google Translate' app already has a communication mode where two people with different languages can talk, but if it worked good there was nothing preventing them to make such an earpiece.

hyperpallium 10y ago
They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20[], which is pretty often. But in a face to face conversation, with so much non-verbal communication going on, it may be more than enough. Very different from cold, isolated translation or online. It's certainly far ahead of having no language, or trying to look up a phrase book. BTW It's like "word lens" for audio https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Lens Google bought and made it free. I've tried it, and it works, it's very cool. But I don't know if it's actually that useful, or even gets used much, in the field. [] EDIT sorry, those figures were just for speech recognition!
- piyush_soni 10y ago
  > They are something like 95% right, 1 wrong in 20 Which set of languages is this stat about? For example, trying English with Hindi (they don't support it right now), though Google Translate is impressive, there are still a lot of mistakes (much more than 1 in 20). For English to Spanish, I assume the error rate would be lesser in comparison.
  - samastur 10y ago
    It isn't that better. Admittedly I am only learning Spanish, but I get odd or incorrect translations far more often than 1 in 20 and because I am a beginner, I don't throw really difficult cases at it. This is also text only use so ignoring things like accents (was that a p, v or b?) which can make the whole thing even more difficult. For other languages, like my native Slovenian, it is even more ridiculous.
10y ago

bluesign 10y ago

Or you can always use babel fish but it is a bit ticklish

netsharc 10y ago

"Do you want... do you want to come back to my place, bouncy-bouncy?"

Piskvorrr 10y ago
My hovercraft is full of eels.

kriro 10y ago

How good are cell phone microphones? Could I hack up a similar device with my regular headset plugged into my phone and the phone picking up the speech and translating it and reading it back to me (Google Translate)? So basically phone/app doing all the work and using whatever headphone is available. I suppose the hard parts are identifying what originates from a person and the actual speech to text and back? So far it seems like it could be build from existing blocks. Doesn't have to be great and can gradually improve...a worthy hack around project imo I haven't checked in on CMU's Sphinx in a while but that was a speech-speech system I looked at for a bit. What are the state of the art building blocks for such a project? Would I want speech-text-speech (I assume this is easier?) or directly speech-speech? Edit: This list seems useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_software#Open_source_acoustic_models_and_speech_corpus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_speech_recognition_sof...

r-w 10y ago
Doesn't seem far from what Google Translate already does; it's just a matter of automatically dictating the translation.

pka 10y ago

I remember reading an "interactive" book as a kid (a book with numbered short episodes, and at the end of each one you are presented with a couple of choices how the story would continue, it was awesome) where the good guy was sent back in time by the bad guy to the wild west where he had to convince the indians to trust him and fight with him against the same bad guy, who liked to slaughter them for fun, or die with them. In order to understand the natives, he had some gadget implanted in his brain that translated their language directly into his own. I remember thinking "yeah right, never gonna happen." :) This is probably far away from being able to translate languages perfectly, but still. The future came pretty fast.

scotty79 10y ago

I'd like to see more audio augmented reality systems. Translation, taking baby cry down a notch, amplifying speech directed at you, autofiguring out best moment to tell you things you might need to know.

phireal 10y ago
> taking baby cry down a notch This could end badly. I think the whole purpose of babies crying is to ensure you do something about it. Not that there's always a solution, but I'd rather be awoken by a loud, irritating cry frequently than not hear them when they might need me.
- DoubleMalt 10y ago
  Yes, but in public where I am exposed to other people's offspring that would be great. Especially when there is no escape like in planes.
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- gokhan 10y ago
  You may want it if it's not your baby. Sitting next to one in a plane, for example.
- scotty79 10y ago
  With baby everyting can go badly. I wasn't thinking about shutting out baby cry to get some sleep (sleeping with headphones?) but rather making it little less intrusive when it screems in your face and you are sufficiently aware that it does already. Also I was thinking about capping the volume of baby cry to some level (80dB?) not reducing it propotionately. Besides, I'm not sure how the number of babies harmed because of not crying loud enough compares to the number of babies that were hurt because they cried too loud. Loudness of baby cries is probably delicately finetuned for other times when incentive to feed you baby had to overcome the desire to feed youself bit more. I think modern humans have enough other incentives to keep their babies alive and healthy. Disclaimer: I have no children. I am not significantly bothered by other people babies crying.

nxzero 10y ago

Always imagine everyone using tech like this, slowly using their own slang, then something goes wrong, devices die, and no one understands the slang languages each person now uses. __ Person : Babel. Person2: Babel? Person : Babel!!

saalweachter 10y ago
To a certain extent, this is equivalent to "imagine everyone's glasses fell off and broke". Sure, these devices are more complex and only a handful of people know how they work, but by the time they spread through an entire civilization and we adapted to be unable to communicate without them... they'd be as robust as modern day glasses and you'd have repair services in every mall.
- nxzero 10y ago
  Maybe, maybe not, but agree that your version of the future is just, if not more, as possible. That said, more complex things get, the more likely that something will be missed, an error made, and/or unaccounted for due to its not having been seen before. On the bright side, intentional disruption rarely have this sort of impact.

impy 10y ago

I'm skeptical we'll be seeing this device. I guess it'll mainly depend if they'd get funded and even then I only see this as a short lived gimmick. The machine translation software just isn't good enough. It's unmissable to me, but for real time translation, it's simply not there yet. Since they have to license the speech recognition and machine translation technologies, in the end they'll just be competing with bluetooth headsets that are suited for picking up voices in conversations and they'll simple draw the shortest straw.

visarga 10y ago
Agree. What does the earplug device offer that regular bluetooth headsets don't. The actual translation is happening in the phone or cloud anyway.
- impy 10y ago
  Well, the regular bluetooth headsets wont do the job just yet, you want the microphone to be directional forward facing to keep it simple, preferably adaptable but that's more complex. The regular bluetooth headsets are aimed at picking up your own voice. So you'd want something more hearing aid like.

kinai 10y ago

For business yes, for private? No thank you, you'll lose a lot of knowledge, understanding, mental skills by not trying to learn/understand a new language.

dcw303 10y ago

I have a bad enough time getting Siri to understand my Aussie accent. Throw in something as inaccurate as Google Translate and you'll have... A pile of garbage really. I desperately need something to translate Japanese into my ear, and I'm probably just good enough to relay my point back without the other party needing an eng->jp version, so I would be a prime customer for this gadget. But the technological accuracy is just not yet there in either speech recognition or translation.

Grue3 10y ago
The japanese version will be pretty terrible, I'd imagine. Too much homophones and ambiguous wording. "sounandayo!" = そうなんだよ "that's right!" = 遭難だよ "it's an accident!"
- emodendroket 10y ago
  The pitch on those are quite different and there is obviously context to rely on too. I mean whether the software can do all that is a question, but something like Siri does OK with Japanese speech recognition (at least not a lot worse than other languages from what I can tell).
GordonS 10y ago
I'm from Scotland, and on the rare occassions time I need to phone a US voice activated phone line (e.g. Expedia.com's), I have to put on a ridiculous American accent for the system to understand me. This is a hard problem.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8
- thedaemon 10y ago
  As a Southern American, I have to put on a Northern or Western American accent. Don't feel so bad.

smilbandit 10y ago

"The creator says he came up with the idea when he met a French girl." and just like that he came up with the whole concept of real time language translation, something the world has never even considered before /snark

Normal_gaussian 10y ago
Annoyingly worded, but probably means "attained the drive for pursuing the idea" instead. If it was a more common realisation that it is not the idea but the drive that is rare then we would have a lot fewer hot air inventors.
- johanneskanybal 10y ago
  Well that's what makes it funny it's not even that it's just general advancements in this area makes this a very natural thing to pursue.
e12e 10y ago
Well, it might be that the beautiful British girl at that Islington flat-party was busy talking to an alien herself.
dean 10y ago
Yeah, this is what I came here to say as well. And while we're at it, I got this great idea that we should cure cancer. The idea came to me when I saw someone sick with cancer. Next stop: patent office.
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dang 10y ago
Applying the Principle of Charity—i.e. choosing to respond to the strongest interpretation of a statement—would have been helpful here. There are multiple interpretations of a phrase like that. Choosing an obviously idiotic one leads to snarky internet comments, something we need less of on HN. Choosing the strongest one might lead you to post nothing or it might trigger a thoughtful response. Either way we get better signal/noise ratio, which is what we're hoping for here. http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html

Kurtz79 10y ago

Sorry to sound so negative, but it seems something halfway between an April Fool and some Kickstarter "scam" (possibly in good conscience, but still). Both voice recognition and translation are HARD problems, for which even companies with tons of resources and talent like Apple and Google were able to provide only sketchy and partial solutions. No to mention issues like battery life, connectivity (hard to believe this device would be able to work without a permanent connection to cloud servers doing the heavy lifting, like Siri does) etc... The FAQ is simply "too good to be true". http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and-launch-date/ http://www.waverlylabs.com/2016/05/faqs-about-early-bird-and...

dclowd9901 10y ago
Meanwhile, Bragi's wireless headphones have a microphone for pass-thru audio, and bluetooth connectivity. Coupled with a smartphone, I'm curious why an app for this doesn't already exist?
mikeash 10y ago
Jibbigo was doing decent voice-to-voice translation entirely locally back in the iPhone 3GS days. You still had all the usual pitfalls of voice recognition and machine translation, but it was good enough to be useful. Your FAQ link isn't loading for me (hugged to death?) but I watched the video on the page HN links to here and I see nothing in it that's infeasible. As with any voice recognition and machine translation product, you'll probably need to be patient and tolerant of many errors, and I wouldn't be surprised if they gloss over that, but it could still be useful. Edit: the FAQ finally loaded. I don't see anything particularly remarkable in there. There are no promises for battery life, speed, or accuracy. The basic premise of offline voice-to-voice translation is totally doable and has been done.
ma2rten 10y ago
Maybe they are using Google translate and Google speach api?
- hangonhn 10y ago
  Those APIs aren't free and the lag between the translation and network connectivity means it would be very difficult to have a real time conversation.

planetjones 10y ago

I just don't see this working very well. The current language translation tools just are not good enough to support a proper conversation. Translating languages via technology is a hard problem and it's far from solved. Coupled with this fundamental problem is identifying speech accurately; something Siri fails to do regularly with my voice. If this thing gets built I am guessing it will be a novelty product.

Grue3 10y ago

This isn't necessarily possible for any two random languages. Not every language has a SubjectVerbObject order like English, and even if it does, each language has its own quirks with how the words are ordered. For example in spanish "un pez grande" = "a big fish", but if you translate in real time it comes out as "a fish big". Of course, an interpreter can reword it as "a fish, which is big, ..." but this is not always possible.

Zklsalue8 10y ago

Machine translation is so bad that I can't get excited.

lordxenu 10y ago

This seems like a scam, or at best a marketing lie. Voice recognition is still an experimental field that's very difficult to get right. Even today's professional voice recognition software requires some voice training. There's no way this thing can accurately pick up speech in a random environment. And given that most voice recognition software require some decent hardware (think your phone or your pc). I doubt it's gonna fit into that tiny earpiece with today's hardware specs.

Qworg 10y ago

This is just Skype Translator coupled with an earpiece... :) https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-translator/ https://www.skype.com/en/features/skype-translator/

rasz_pl 10y ago

Its a scam We have brilliant entrepreneur coming up with revolutionary idea no one had before(lol), sleek renders and good looking models, price point already set, all that and ... absolutely ZERO tech behind it. lets set so double the killer delete select all

gwbas1c 10y ago

I must admit that I'm highly skeptical. Show me a working app for my phone that does voice translation, and then I'll believe that something like this works.

CodeSheikh 10y ago

Too good to be true. Seems like they are just trying to get some media traction to convince some VC for some funding or creating a footprint for themselves in the tech fraternity. Yes I will be a cynical hypocrite when it hits the market with seamless performance and after I will purchase it. Real life scenario: French chick: Bonjour. es tu perdu? Scrawny-geek: (All blushing and shit...Is she interested in me? put on "groundbreaking" Pilot earbuds) FC: excusez moi mister!! SG: gives hand gesture to wait 10 seconds time lapse analog audio signals are converted to digital and then data buffer is sent to the smartphone via BT. Phone pre-process the raw data and sends it to Watson-Siri-Echo-Now-esque ultra system composed of signal processor then NLP then translator and it sends it back to the phone and phone does some more voodoo on it and sends it back to the Pilot via BT and plays it to its user. SG: Oh. I am sorry mademoiselle. I am just trying to find direction to the bathroom. FC: lost and confused expressions appear as if she did not understand one word of English SG: punching the air in frustration..wish this device could play the translation back to me in French

johanneskanybal 10y ago

"came up with the idea"

dboreham 10y ago

What is wrong with you people? 7 hours old and only TWO mentions of Douglas Adams??

6stringmerc 10y ago

Considering the variety of French accents - Paris, regional France, Africa, Caribbean, Canadian, South East Asian, and guys like me in Texas and more - I'm rather skeptical this unit will work as seamlessly as the marketing video advertises. Just a thought. C'est mignonne, vraiment.

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anigbrowl 10y ago

This product indeed sounds too good to be true but we'll probably have something that delivers within 10 years. Add that to a virtual assistant and the future could be very different. Automatthew's Friend by Stanislaw Lem explores one possible scenario.

nikkwong 10y ago

Just the fact that they are listing their product on Indiegogo instead of Kickstarter signals to me that they probably got shut when trying to publish their project on Kickstarter—who is trying hard to distance theirselves from these moonshot projects that are likely to disappoint consumers. If you don't have a really serious working prototype now, Kickstarter is super-duper hesitant to let you on their platform.

chipotle2 10y ago

if you type finnish into google translate, the results in english are pretty bad. furthermore, google translate only manages the "written" finnish language... which nobody talks like. everyone uses "spoken" finnish which is not translated at all in google translate. i wonder how many other languages have this property.

ecolak 10y ago

Nothing new here. As the article mentions, it's the Babelfish from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I've wanted to build one myself since I read the book, but the fundamental problem of machines translating languages is still a very hard problem. This thing won't work.

syngrog66 10y ago

About a year ago someone tried hiring me to do this. At least to do research and report back with recommendations. On one hand I think we've never been closer to being able to create this kind of product. On the other its still rife with complexity and edge cases. Reality is messy.